Blood, Thicker Than Water
by The Junkiest Toon
Summary: A Stark, A Carter, A Granger: Hermione (Stark-Carter) Granger discovers the family legacy and learns how to shape her pain into heroism. Starring Edwin and Anna Jarvis. Exploring the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Hermione-centric. 1st in the A Stark, A Carter, A Granger series. Pre-Iron Man.
1. Chapter 1: A Stark, A Carter, A Granger

**Blood, Thicker Than Water**

 **Author Note:**

 **To readers of "The War Prize," I am so sorry that you clicked on this thinking I had posted a new chapter; if it helps, I do not consider that story abandoned, just enduring a very long case of writer's block. I hope to get a new chapter up by January. I think getting this story out of my head onto the site will help me do it. To my past readers, thank you for all of your support, and I have not forgotten you.**

 **This is very AU: I am merely playing with Marvel Cinematic Universe and Harry Potter and the Queen of all Queens, Hermione Granger. This will explore the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Hermione-centric. I obviously do not own Harry Potter or the Marvel Cinematic Universe.**

A Stark, A Carter, A Granger

 _What is your first memory?_

It's a question Hermione's therapist asks her.

It's a good question, Hermione supposes: we are human beings composed of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, the protein of our filaments intertwined with cellular consciousness—but further than that, our _identity_ , which Hermione equates with _soul_ , is a hodgepodge mosaic of our different choices, our different impressions, our different recollections.

So here is what she knows, here is Hermione's hodgepodge mosaic: she doesn't remember anything until the age of five, and then suddenly there is a blooming of memory, bursting in kaleidoscope fashion: a woman who Hermione calls Mother who is not her mother, a man who Hermione calls Father who is not her father—they had other names before, they tell Hermione, that she must not use; before that, the man that Hermione calls Father is confused by the "computers" and the "WorldWideWeb" and he searches over and over for someone called _Stark, Stark, Stark, Stark, Howard Stark, Hermione Stark, Stark, Stark,_ and he types the letters in over and over, hitting the keys so hard he breaks one, and then he finally searches for _jobs, open work_ ; before that, Hermione remembers the woman she calls Mother crying at the sight of the shiny buildings and convertibles and the music with too many beat-beats, and saying _England 1990, 1990,_ in a question, not a statement; and finally, before that, Hermione remembers blue light and golden tendrils and a tunneling wormhole that burned with embers.

And before that, nothing.

So this is the start of Hermione.

Hermione Granger, as the woman she calls Mother and the man she calls Father, tell her she must be named (though when Hermione tastes the words, they don't roll right in her mouth): her tongue wants to clip at the roof of her mouth, or roll two syllables long then short, but _Hermione_ seems to fit just fine.

"Daughter of Helen of Troy," the woman she calls Mother says, wistfully. "An inside joke your father made. You would understand, darling, if time was different."

If _time_ was different, not if times were different. Hermione makes a note of this, remembers.

See, after that wormhole, everything Hermione sees she remembers. Eidetic memory, her therapist calls it. Her therapist is especially intrigued by this, as most of her patients cannot pinpoint the exact start of their memories. But Hermione sees the tangible color of her past until before the wormhole, where it melts into black tar. The therapist links this memory to Hermione's "problems."

(Though of course Hermione doesn't say "wormhole" or "time" or "different Mother and Father" in her sessions, since her new Mother and Father were very clear on those points. She uses codes, like "new house," "adopted," and "I think that is all for this session, thank you.")

Hermione's "problems" are many and grow with each year:

When she is five she has a recurring nightmare of being sucked into black tar that glows with gold threads and tunnels her into the rings of Saturn; she doesn't sleep more than four hours a night for two months. This is when Hermione first meets her therapist: the man she calls Father carries her, wrapped in his coat, into the therapist's office. They stay long after office hours are over.

When she is six she grows distrustful of this Mother and Father. This Mother is kind and this Father achingly gentle, but she doesn't like to be left alone with them. She begs to go to school and is enrolled in accelerated programs so that there will be more space between her and the two of them. She learns about genetics and sees the other children with their parents. Then the Nature program on the television features cuckoo birds, and Hermione is finally able to pinpoint that this is what she feels like, a cuckoo bird in a robin's nest, and when she finally screams this at them, hurling her dinner plate at the floor, she points out this Mother's sleek ginger hair and their shared blue eyes. Hermione shares none of their features. Hermione is a painter's swatch of similar color: cream skin, caramel hair and eyes. Little Brioche, this Father calls her. So when Hermione compares her delicate smallness and her mass of caramel hair, already frizzing a two good inches from her elbows, her breath catches from the unfairness. Hermione doesn't belong here and every cell of her has a memory of it that she just can't reach.

This Father looks at this Mother before burying his face in his hands. "Hermione," he says, "Little Brioche, darling, we need to tell you something."

This Mother stands up from her chair so hard it screeches against the dining floor. She is breathing hard. The glint of the light picks up the red in her hair. She stalks from the room without a glance at Hermione's shattered plate.

This Father leads Hermione to the back of the house, where there is a very thin straggle of land with peas and pumpkins struggling in the soil (their "victory garden," as they call it). He brushes aside some vines and digs with his fingers until he unearths a little metal box. It's locked; the lock looks expensive. Hermione files this away for later.

They bring the locked box into the dining room where the box is unlocked and its contents spill over the table. Hermione handles a delicate leather wallet with _EJ_ stitched on the side. She opens it up to find an ID with this Father's picture and the name _Edwin Jarvis_ on the side. And another for _Anna Jarvis_ , and this Mother's picture. The dates on both pictures are 1958. And there is another picture, a photograph with well-loved edges, of a beautiful dark-haired woman with Hermione's nose and the silhouette of a dark-haired mustached man leaning toward her. They are both wrapped in furs, and there is snow around them, and there in the background, smiling at the two figures, is the new Father. Hermione flips it over. It's labeled, _H & P &_ _J_ , _1952._

"That was taken in Russia," the man Hermione knows as new Father and Edwin Jarvis. His eyes have gone soft. "That was a year before you came along."

Even at six, Hermione can do maths, and she knows that the maths don't add up. But her brain snags on something: "You're Jarvis?"

The man's face lights up like a cotton-film bulb. "You remember?"

"No," Hermione says, a bit torn at his now-crestfallen face, so she adds, "But it feels right: like Hermione. Jarvis." It does.

Jarvis ducks his head, suddenly shy. "I was there when you were born. Hell," he taps the photo, "I was there before you were born. I watched your parents fall in love. I watched them fall in love with you. I loved you, too. I used to take care of you, change your nappies. No one could put you to sleep like me, not even your mum." He is so proud of that fact.

Hermione looks down at that photo, at those happy incandescent faces. "What…happened?"

Jarvis's face clouds over; Hermione is a bit taken aback. It's the most mood changes in rapid succession she's ever seen on this gentle man. She files this into her brain, too.

"War. War happened. And then the War ended but it didn't really end, not for your mum or your dad. There is Evil, Hermione. True Evil," and he says it like a proper noun, and Hermione read that proper nouns indicate specifics in particular, an individual. She wonders what individual he means. She is focused so much on this that she almost misses the last part: "Your parents fought it. And then you were targeted. You, Anna, me, we should be dead. Dead. But there was a miracle: a machine malfunctioned and space opened up and there was time, and we fell through. Some Evil fell through, too. No clue why or how. They could still be after us, you. And we ended up here, in England. No record of a Howard Stark ever existing. It's a different world, this world. With the Spice Rack girls and ridiculous boards with wheels and pocket calculators, though to be fair I'm really appreciative of the last one—"

They laugh over that one, mostly because Jarvis looks so wistful and Hermione can already feel the burn of tears. The man and woman in the picture could be dead. Could be old. Could have five little girls that look just like Hermione and so they don't miss her one bit.

It's so much, it's just so much, all at once, Hermione feels like she will explode—

Then Jarvis asks, "Do you want to hear of your mum and dad?"

And Jarvis tells of her of three soldiers: a captain of men, flag-wrapped and shield-sworn; an inventor of hope; and of a red-lipped agent who loved Hermione very much. He tells her the name of her parents, her real parents: Howard Stark, Peggy Carter. She rolls the names with her tongue and they fit. _Howard, Peggy. Stark, Carter. Stark-Carter._ _Hermione Stark, Hermione Carter. Hermione Stark-Carter_.

Hermione feels a pit in her stomach, an unexplainable grief, a pit that swallows up her stomach and lungs and esophagus pipe, and it feels like an expanding and collapsing, and Hermione remembers learning of black holes—it feels like there is a black hole in her chest, a squeezing of her body's matter and all that is Hermione. It's loss on a cellular level. She is distantly aware of the china rattling, light bulbs shattering. The rest of Hermione remembers what she can't, and all that is left is this squeezing strangulation—

The front door almost bursts off its hinges, it is swung open so hard: the new Mother—Anna Jarvis, a distant part of her mind reminds her—crashes through. The shiny ginger hair is gone, dyed brunette so quickly the dye still sticks to the scalp, and the hair looks like it has been permed to within an inch of its life. She looks exactly—exactly—like a blue-eyed, fluffier version of Hermione.

Hermione bursts into tears, and is quickly enfolded into Jarvis' arms, then Anna's. And locked within their grip, she feels the black hole within her start to subside. She may be a cuckoo bird, a daughter of a Howard and Peggy from another time, but these two are cuckoobirds, too. And they have a cuckoobird nest, together. And so Hermione renames her cuckoo birds: Jarvis to Daddy, Anna to Mama. And yes, of course Hermione will remember this moment, but beyond that she will treasure this very moment. On bad days she will take out this memory and study it like a seashell.

Then things are better, for a time.

But when she is seven Hermione starts lighting things on fire. On accident.

The accident part doesn't help much when she accidentally burns their small house down. Hermione is grounded from all books, but Mama simply looks at Daddy and says, "Get a house with a yard this time. A swingset. Some trees. Something she can play in."

So they move to a new house in London with a tree in the backyard that they carve their old initials and new initials into: _H S-C, HG; EJ, EG; AJ, AG._ And Mama grows her victory garden even though the victory has long-since been won, and both Mama and Daddy study to become dentists, a respectable enough job. And the fires stop.

The black hole in Hermione stops for a time, too. Sometimes it flares up in small moments, like when a stranger asks for the time, and Hermione is torn between two responses she can't define. When Hermione is discovered to have secretly strapped four wristwatches to her arm, each precise to the second, she is taken to the therapist again. The therapist mandates family therapy, so Daddy and Mama come, too.

But even Daddy and Mama, pros as they are at secreting their 1950 life into code, can't find a way to participate without it feeling like a flubber of a lie, so the therapists visits stop. Instead, Daddy and Mama institute a "family council," where no one is allowed dinner or bed until they get all their truth out.

Hermione has a lot of truths to get out, they discover. But Hermione is surprised to discover they have just as many truths. Daddy hates his wardrobe. Hates it. "Dentists are lazy slobs," he says. "They just don't give a damn about anything but teeth." (In the old photograph, Hermione remembers his crisp thrice-ironed collar, pristine three-piece suit, and red-on-a-gold pattern silk tie.) Mama loves the freedom in showing clavicle and cleavage and thigh, but even she thinks the miniskirts are too much. And they both can't handle the fried food and the loud music and the knowledge that all their cigarettes ate little holes in their lungs. They both keep little pistols beside their bed, Hermione learns. Sometimes Mama comes to watch Hermione when she is sleeping because she has had a dream that the Evil men have come to take Hermione away. Sometimes Daddy stays awake cleaning his gun.

And Hermione, they learn, caused those fires when she got mad or sad or lonely and her black hole burned. They also learn of the books that float to her when they are on too high of a shelf, and the one time she turned the TV on by pointing at it and the screen shattered. They learn all these things when Hermione is seven, so Hermione thinks they—even they, cuckoo birds from another world, another time—shouldn't be as surprised as they are at the letter she receives for her 11th birthday, addressed to _Miss HG, H S-C, main floor, family library, pink bed._ Her invitation to a place for other cuckoo birds, a place called Hogwarts.

Hermione swirls the word in her mouth and smiles at the taste.

 **Author's note: I plan to delve further into Howard/Peggy and explore Hermione's entrance into the MCU, starting with the** _ **Iron Man**_ **film. Thank you for reading—your thoughts are most appreciated. Please review!**


	2. Chapter 2: Hogwarts' Children

Author's Note: I own nothing (not Harry Potter, not Sappho, nor her writings).

Hogwarts' Children

* * *

First Year

Hermione is eleven, almost twelve, when the woman in the funny hat and tartan arrives. It was a month since Hermione's letter—her Hogwarts letter, she crows silently—and Hermione knows that this will be her black hole solution; this will be her antidote to the poison in her dreams. So when the woman in the funny hat and tartan sits primly across from her parents on their paisley-patterned sofa, and says that magic is Hermione's magnum opus, Hermione takes her at her full word.

Hermione weaves her knees over and under each other anxiously while Daddy offers a cup of tea and Mama smooths her skirt.

The hat-and-tartan woman—McGonagall, Hermione of course remembers, Professor McGonagall, but there's something so delicious about defining this woman and her tightlacedness by a pointy hat and tartan that's punchy to look upon—the hat-and-tartan woman accepts a cup of tea archly. She takes a sip while surveying the room—the antique World War II-era clock on the mantel, the framed photographs of Hermione missing her two front teeth, the lines of the lamps free of dust. Everything here, Hermione knows, down to the guns hidden underneath Daddy's embroidered pillow, speaks of warmth underlined by military precision.

"So, Mr. and Mrs. Granger—you're both dentists?" Professor McGonagall asks, and Hermione supposes she should get used to calling hat-and-tartan woman Professor McGonagall, because what if she was called on in class and answered, Yes, Hat-and-Tartan Woman?

Daddy and Mama don't miss a beat, linking hands in unison. "Yes," they both answer at the same, Daddy looking bashful and Mama looking amused. Distantly, Hermione is always in awe of their performance—yes, I'm a dentist; yes, call us Anna and Edwin, please; and (Hermione's favorite) yes, we do move _around,_ don't we?

Though perhaps this is less performance, Hermione realizes with a jolt, watching Mama smile at McGonagall over her cup of tea, the light catching her frizzy dyed-brown strands. Even Daddy looks relaxed, at ease. Or, at as much ease as one can be with a professed witch in the room.

Perhaps, Hermione thinks, watching the casual gesture, the ease to which they answer Professor McGonagall's questions, how quickly and instinctively their heads looked up at "Mr. and Mrs. Granger." Perhaps this isn't pantomime, this isn't show anymore. Maybe they finally fit into this world.

Hermione's black hole crackles; jealousy streams from her pores so quickly that the light flickers and Hermione has to clench her fists.

The adults in the room look over to her concernedly. Hermione breathes deep, smooths her palm over her knees, gives Mama and Daddy a reassuring smile. She shouldn't be jealous. She shouldn't be jealous that the people she loves most in the world, the people who love her most in the world, have found some peace in the life they hodgepodged together (for her sake, her always-reliable memory whispers). Even if Hermione, outside of this hodgepodge family, still feels like a cuckoo bird awash in a nest not her own.

Satisfied that the flicker of light was not of importance, Professor McGonagall turns her attention back to Hermione's parents. "You're taking this rather well," she says, taking a sip. "Not many muggle parents do."

 _Muggle_. Hermione latches onto this word, files it away for further review.

Mama and Daddy exchange a look. "Well, not much surprises us anymore," Daddy hedges, and both their gazes turn far away. Instantly, Hermione is even more ashamed of her jealous burst because she knows their minds have gone to GI pinup queens and _Since You Went Away_ and victories celebrated in the town square.

"I see," Professor McGonagall says, and settles her teacup into its saucer with a finality that suggests that the conversation is over. "Now," she smiles, turning to Hermione, "Contact me with any questions, and be on that train in September."

She leaves, and the quasi-Jarvis-Grangers lapse into silence: her parents with their minds to the past, Hermione with her mind to the future.

* * *

September arrives, and the first thought in Hermione's mind is, what a lovely train. Sleek black and metal-fleshy, not skeletal at all. Its rims are red, it's light golden. This is a train one would take on a Narnia journey, Hermione thinks, and even as Mama's and Daddy's arms lock around her, so tightly Hermione is not even sure whose chest her nose is pressing into, Hermione thinks this will be her Narnia train.

She's right: on the train she meets a boy, Ron, and a boy, Harry.

There's something about Harry that arrests her immediately. Maybe she sees the darkness of Howard Stark's coloring in the jet of Harry's hair, but it's almost a prescient feeling, a connection where she looks in Harry's face and sees someone else.

They hate her, of course.

Cuckoobird out of the cuckoobird nest.

Hermione hears Ron Weasley's comment and hides away in the bathroom, bawling. She thought Hogwarts would be different. Why would she think that?

She pulls through her files of memory of every bully in every primary school, sniffling at each one, before finally settling on a memory of Mama and Daddy reading her _Peter Pan._ She thinks of the line on fairies and magic being born from laughter and wishes for something so bright. She wants to go home to Mama and Daddy where she's still a cuckoobird but they're _okay_ with it, they'll still _love_ her, she'll never have to leave home _ever again_.

She cries in a bathroom stall for hours until a troll comes crashing through.

Later, Hermione pens a new proverb: one can always count on a troll to put things in perspective.

When the troll is beaten, the boys covered in water and porcelain dust, and Hermione wearing the biggest stupid grin of her life, she has an epiphany: she has found her nest.

It's a nest of cuckoobirds, too: neglected Ron whose mother missed the dirt on his nose and thin, and malnourished Harry who is so grateful for a Christmas present of sugarfree candy that Hermione almost cries.

She protects this nest through Snape and Fluffy and Nicholas Flamel, through chess pieces and poisons and great wheels of fire. Harry fights Voldemort, and when they all coalesce in the hospital wing, they choose to all share Harry's hospital bed though they each have their own. Ron on one side, Hermione on the other, Harry incandescent in the middle: Hermione leans in tight and squeezes, and her arms almost go around them both.

* * *

Second Year

She's read the texts, heard the rumors. She knows what mudblood means. No one had to explain it to her. What would that be like, she wonders, looking at Harry, who has the same access to the materials she's had and here is she is, explaining how here she will always be other, she will always be cuckoobird.

It only helps that Harry is a cuckoobird, too. The scar on his forehead stains him as much her "dirty blood."

(Though funnily enough, this helps her feel closer to Daddy and Mama and Howard Stark and Peggy Carter. They fought a war against blood purists, they bled and suffered and killed against those beliefs.

Now muggleborns are being attacked and Hermione sees in the Slytherin's apathy concentration camps and barbed wire and she thinks, _fight, fight, fight!_.

So in a way, a weird twisted way that Hermione knows she can never tell therapists, perhaps never tell Daddy or Mama neither, Hermione appreciates—is even thankful for—stupid Draco Malfoy and his big bigot head.)

Hermione thinks it's this what causes her to pore so long in the library until she reads the words _basilisk_ and _petrify_ and _kill_. She's solved it.

She is grasping the book in elation when she hears a scuffle, no, a slither—a weight grating seamlessly against stone.

It's here; it's here for her.

Hermione rips the page, crumples it in her hand, closes her eyes, run. She collides with something more bodily than table, and her first thought is that it will eat her. But no—it's another girl, an older girl, and Hermione grabs her, tells her in garbled gibberish that there is a basilisk, it will kill them or poison them or eat them—and all through this Hermione's stupid, unforgiving, fantastic memory is filing through scenes of _Jaws_ for some reason, and this frightens so much she stutters into silence—but the girl is smart and brave and understands immediately. She grabs Hermione's hand, squeezes.

They hold each other and stumble together blindly until they can scrounge a pocketmirror from the girl's satchel. And Hermione grasps the girl's hand and the girl grasps back and they angle the mirror around a bookcase—they are so close to the exit—and then yellow eyes like iridescent lanterns—

* * *

Hermione dreams when she's petrified. Later, she knows that she read that petrification victims don't dream, but she did.

It's a formless dream, shadowfilled and watercolored, more sound than sight, but she thinks she hears a lullaby. Something soft. Something soothing. Maybe it's a heartbeat.

It could be male, could be female, could be personless.

But she hopes this dream belongs to Howard Stark and Peggy Carter.

* * *

When she wakes, Ron regales her with tales of their bravery. Her black hole flares up barely, just enough to static her hair, because Ron is sweet in his enthusiasm and too-loud voice. She wants to remind him that she was petrified, not deaf, when he tells her all about Tom Riddle and his diary.

Tom Riddle sounds like a young Hitler in the making, if you ask her. She knows a lot about Hitler. Mama made sure of that. Nazis killed Mama's family. Almost killed Mama, too.

Tom Riddle as Adolf scares her more than the basilisk. A basilisk is just a beast; it was following orders. And in this world it took Harry and Ron—children—to defeat the evil encroaching on the world. There were no Allied troops, no supporting war bonds. It took two twelve year olds to win the day while the adults focused their attentions elsewhere.

Hermione files this to memory. Another thing she files: the older girl, who let her cling to her hand in the sweating dark, is named Penelope Clearwater.

That's important to Hermione. Harry and Ron get the house points, but Penelope—Penelope should win the House Cup.

* * *

When Hermione goes home, she hugs her parents so fiercely that her knees give way and they follow her, flopping, to their knees. During their family council, Mama asks if everything was okay—there were long spaces without letters, why didn't you write?

This is a moment Hermione knows she will be so ashamed of in her memory shuffle, a moment entirely coated with selfishness and shame. She looks at her sweet, brave Mama and lies: "Of course; I'm so sorry—I just got carried away with Ron and Harry and exams."

Because at the forefront of her mind is Penelope Clearwater, half-blood, who saved her when Penelope could have saved herself. And if she mentions Voldemort and possession and basilisks or even three-headed dogs, Mama and Daddy will lock out all access to Hogwarts.

And one day, just one day, Hermione wants to be someone's Penelope Clearwater.

* * *

Third Year

When Hermione is just turned-fourteen, Professor McGonagall gives Hermione a time-turner that will break her heart.

The gold dust in her hourglass—not even a thimbleful, definitely not enough to go back to that day in 1990 with that blue portal wormholing through time, space, dimension; not enough to go back to that day where she first popped into this world; so not enough to find that portal and circle through to the other side, to that post-war world with a Peggy Carter and a Howard Stark and silver Ferris wheels and red-lipped women and carefully-hatted men, all dripping with swagger that comes from world-weary exhaustion. She twirls it, forefinger over thumb over forefinger, and thinks that if she could take the chance to jump through that portal, she would. She would even leave everything behind—her classes, even Arithmancy and Charms and Ancient Runes; even Hogwarts, where she's never felt more at home; even Daddy and Mama, who she loves; even Ron and Harry, who—and her heart quakes at this confession—she loves even more. Even them, her blue-and-green-eyed Gryffindor brothers, she would leave behind, to their Quidditch and tests and end-of-year trains, for just the mere hope of finding her parents.

Harry would understand this, she thinks.

Hermione thinks on this possibility all year. Even with pressing matters like dementors on the grounds and punching Draco Malfoy so hard her hand cracks and the rush is _electric_ , even with the criminal Sirius Black escaped from Azkaban, the idea to leave stays on her mind.

But then—

Then there is a Grimm and a willow and Scabbers twitches into a bald-scalped buck-toothed man, Peter Pettigrew, and all is chaos—there is Sirius Black and Professor Lupin and Professor Snape and Ron, her poor Ron, with his leg all busted, and Sirius Black is pointing his wand _straight at Harry—_ Hermione dives in front of Harry, doesn't think, shields him with chest and arm and hair and she finds herself saying, "If you want to kill Harry, you'll have to kill us, too!"

And later, shivering after the last Time-Turner's spin-thimble-spinning-spin-spin-thimblefuls-spinblefuls of sand have settled into place, with Ron in the hospital bed to the right and Harry in the hospital bed to the left, and her brain too tired to _even think_ of anything beside abstract shudders of werewolves and dementors and kisses and hippogriffs, she realizes what she had said: " _you'll have to kill us, too_."And she knows that although Voldemort may be gone—but then she remembers the Voldemort wraiths of first and second year and guesses that evil will reverberate into the years to come—there is still that man Wormtail, and the Death Eaters in Azkaban, and men like Lucius Malfoy. Evil still threatens Harry.

This realization wafts over her, settles softly like a filmy curtain floating down: Hermione decides that she will never leave Ron and Harry alone to this danger, not even for the dream of Howard Stark and Peggy Carter.

* * *

Fourth Year

With this realization, her nightmares of wormholes, blue as oysters, vanish.

Instead, they are replaced with nightmares of rats and teeth and green light hitting her red- and black-haired boys. Ron, spread-eagled, freckles sharp against his skin. Harry, face-down—in her dreams he is always face down; she guesses it is because she cannot bear to think of those green eyes unseeing and glassy—and too still to be breathing.

The only silver lining is that Draco Malfoy is terrified of her. For the rest of the school year, his hand twitches to his face when she walks by.

In the summer, Daddy and Mama shared worried looks at their family council when she lies and tells them her dreams are about the wormhole. The pangs of guilt she feels at lying are greater now; perhaps because the consequences are greater now, too. If she can't go to Hogwarts, she can't help Harry and Ron. If she can't help Harry and Ron…here her mind stutters into her nightmares of scarecrow Ron and Harry spread-eagled and facedown, straw and blood spilling from their bodies. So she lies.

And when Ron pulls her aside at the Quidditch World Cup, his hand at her elbow, she knows she needs to be a better liar.

"Hermione," he fidgets, his hand unconsciously flexing at her elbow. "Are you alright? You look peaky."

A better liar then, and practice makes perfect.

"Fine," she shoots back, and there is a little wedge of her heart capsizing from gravity and grief at the fact that _Ron noticed, Ron who never notices anything_ —and so she points vaguely at a Quidditch Flag and asks, "What's this, Puddlemere then?" Which starts Ron on a tirade about the diversity of Quidditch and how she needs to respect the culture and there are _loyalties_ and _divisions_ and as he prattles on the difference between Puddlemere United and Chudley Cannons, Hermione finds herself grinning like a loon at the way his skin flushes at the ear tips and dimples, and she finds she wants to see if the rest of him flushes, too.

It's a startling thought. This is _Ron_ , Ron who never notices anything, teaspoon Ron, loyal Ron, heart-of-a-lion Ronald Bilius Weasley.

She likes him. Like _like_ _likes_ him. And then there's Harry, and she loves Harry. It's a deep-abiding love, a love that says _In this life, I'll go, too,_ and she knows she will joined with him forever. And Hermione is old enough—fifteen—to know that she is a sexual being (Lockhart at least taught her that), but she doesn't know if what she feels for Harry is romantic, sexual, familial…

(If she's honest, she thinks there are threads of all three. He is the brother she never had, the soul with all her devotion, a green-eyed pantherboy with broken glasses.)

This is what she thinks on when she and the boys are in their Quidditch box and Harry is fiddling with his omnioculars and Ron is jostling for a peek, and then the Bulgarian mascots come out, and oh—

 _Oh._ Veela. Hermione remembers reading about Veela, golden and silvery, ivory and iron. But when they prance through the field, Hermione recalls Sappho— _my tongue is struck silent, a delicate fire suddenly races through my skin—_

She breaks through her haze to see that Ron is over the railing and Harry has a leg already slung over. The veela then sprout beaks and claws, but Hermione doesn't lose her vision of beauty in hair tossed like ribbons. When the Irish mascot comes out and gold dissolves from the sky, she still thinks on this. And when Krum catches the Snitch, she still thinks on this.

Hermione likes Ron and loves Harry and likes Veela and liked Lockhart, and thinking of them (sans Lockhart), her heart warms and her toes curl. She thinks of Peggy Carter, with her razor-sharp lipstick, and it's just a feeling, a feeling with nothing to base it on but an old faded photograph, where the gaze is loose, the smile inviting, the heart open: Peggy Carter is a woman who is unashamed of what she wants.

So later, after the Goblet and the First Task, with Victor Krum hovering around her like flies on sticky fruit, Hermione channels Peggy Carter, her mother of blood. Victor asks her to the Yule Ball, and Hermione finds she likes the bulk of him, too, the shadowy mountain of chest and chin hair (but if Ron or Fleur Delacour had asked, she would have said yes, yes to each, _yes to both_ ), so she accepts. Mama had helped Hermione pick out her dress robes that summer, ruffled like geranium petals or lily folds. They had gotten ice cream and Hermione had gotten strawberry then, and her ruffled dress then, and at the time it felt right—but looking at the dress now, she doesn't feel like that Hermione. She feels like a Hermione who would get mocha fudge ripple or cookie dough or balsamic pear or guava citrus; a Hermione who would trade in these dress robes for something darker, tighter, slinkier.

Her sweet pink dress robes are set aside on the bed, her sensible shoes in the corner, but she hesitates.

Her hand reaches instead for Parvati's forgotten lipstick.

Parvarti is gone, the room is quiet, save for Hermione and the quietly grumbling mirror. "That's not yours," the mirror sneers.

"Hush," Hermione reprimands, transfixed on the color, more crimson than berry. It's shaped like a bullet, and the silver casing catches the light like a cold revolver.

Hermione wets her lip with her tongue, layers it with smears of red. Her mouth unfolds like a rose, plush, inviting, the bow of her lip tight like a petal's edge. Her eyes and hair are still light, but she looks more like Peggy now. Same nose and now same mouth.

—In this moment of longing, she yearns for Mama, too. What is she doing? This feels like a betrayal to Mama, almost, but maybe Mama wouldn't see it as a betrayal—certainly not Mama who loved Daddy who loved Howard-and-Peggy enough to raise their daughter, certainly not Mama who loves Hermione enough to dye her hair through years of burning permanents.

Mama would approve, maybe.

Hermione fingers the jar of Sleekeazy. She was just going to slick her hair with it, knot it up in a bun, but then she remembers Peggy's pincurl waves. She grabs the Sleekeazy, some hair pins. It takes hours, and Hermione's head aches, but her bushy hair is falling in sensuous, purposeful waves.

"Much better!" the mirror croons. "Daaaaaarling, you should wear this all the time."

Hermione looks at her reflection and blinks away tears; she looks like she could have been Peggy's coworker, or friend. A contemporary. Redlipped and sharp.

This makes her feels odd, shaken almost; it feels wrong like this, a poor masquerade, and Hermione knows that if she had kept up with therapy, this would make for a whopper of a session.

Because the saddest truth Hermione has to tell is that this is the closest she has ever felt to the woman who birthed her: a poor mirror image.

She charms the sleeves and layers off the dress, then inks it black.

Gold-haired and dripping in darkness, she feels like a black hole when she takes Victor's arm: a black hole of adrenaline and hormones and a buzzing in the base of her skull that thrums to the music and whenever Victor brushes against her hand.

She dances with him, spinning, and she sees Ron in his horrible fringed robes and Harry awkwardly shuffling, and in this rush, overwhelmed with the lights and the music and the beauty, she wishes that this year they will all be safe.

Of course, it all goes to hell.

* * *

Author's note: Thank you for reviewing—I so appreciate it! Next chapter things go from frying pan to fire. To those who wondered when the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be appearing, never fear…soon.


	3. Chapter 3: Hogwarts' Children Part II

Disclaimer: I do not own _Harry Potter, Iron Man, Avengers,_ or anything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Fourth Year, ending: The Third Task

* * *

Hell is a pit. Not a Hades-pit, a realm of embers and forget-me waters.

No, Hermione decides, watching the Third Task unfold—Hell is the ever-yawning pit in your stomach, the fathomless drop when your intestines warp and stretch, squeezed through a black hole into toothpaste.

Hell is watching Harry disappear— _flash_ —and reappear— _flash_ , form too still to be moving but he must be breathing, he must be breathing—

—scarecrow Harry and his busted up bloodied head, straw oozing from his lightning scar, _flash_ and _flash_ and _flash_ —

Hermione is standing, the whole crowd is standing, and Hermione is too shocked to move: there's a body, _flash_ , eyes frozen to the sky, next to Harry, a blonde-haired boy in yellow-and-black robes.

Cedric. Cedric Diggory, Hogwarts Champion. And Harry, facedown mannequin Harry, suddenly curls up—Hedgehog Harry—and _wails_ , and he grips Cedric's body to him.

And Hermione cannot even mourn Cedric because all she feels is relief. She reaches for Ron—or Ron reaches for her—and mutely they grasp, blinking back tears, and acknowledge the overwhelming gratitude: Harry is alive. Harry is alive and that is all that matters.

* * *

Harry can sense Hermione and Ron's relief as they part for the summer, and their relief is equated only by his anger. Anger at Dumbledore, anger at Fudge, anger at not being quick enough to save Cedric, anger at not being smart enough to save Cedric, anger at the gratitude felt that it was Cedric and not Harry…

The trains take them home and this anger sits between them on the train like a third person, a dementor of betrayal, and Hermione tries to understand, she really does, but losing Harry is unfathomable to her lungs. Her heart skips beats thinking of it. And Ron has been so pale these last two weeks his freckles leap out.

Even with their battlefield of school years behind them, they've never had this close of a call. They had defeated Quirrell; Fawkes had saved Harry; time-turners had saved Sirius.

 _No one had ever died_.

(A part of Hermione wonders if this third-person presence on the train, the anger simmering like a mirage between them, is Cedric's ghost. Unable to move on.

She liked him. _Had_ liked him _._ Distantly, abstractly, because in her foreground was Ron, Viktor, Harry, and Fleur. But she had liked him.)

But Death changes things. Like time, or wormholes.

There really is no going back.

* * *

Fifth Year

Fifth year is a disgusting year. It's bleak and ugly. The weeks before school starts are spent at Grimmauld Place, the dusty shrine to pureblood fanaticism that's desolate as a cauldron bottom. Harry meets hormones and she has to remind herself to breathe deep. Unreservedly. Because cuckoobird Harry, with his cupboard room and absentee aunt and absentee uncle and distant Dumbledore, does not know how to communicate his pain. He never had family councils where they get out all their truths. So he yells and yells and yells, allcaps statements that wiggle exclamation points through her eardrums and shakes the doorframe.

Hermione listens through the static of emotion and tries to parse out Harry's truths: Harry feels scared. Harry feels at fault. Harry feels alone.

In the library, Harry is currently mid-rant, a rare anger not directed at Hermione or Ron but at Sirius and Remus. Hermione sets aside her book, gently. It's on the Goblin Rebellion of 1612, but she wasn't reading, not really. Sirius is a cuckoobird and Remus is a cuckoobird, but they're cuckoobirds of a different nest. They don't know how to help their green-eyed godson, not when those green eyes are slick behind broken glasses.

(She knows Harry knows how to fix his glasses—a simple _Occulus Reparo_. Sometimes she thinks he leaves them broken as a distraction, so people fixate on the glasses and not the eyes. Not the emotions floating beneath. Like how he keeps his hair long to distract from his scar.)

She wafts up behind Remus, inline of Harry's sight, and he is screaming but she is calm, cool, collected. So she thinks they all are surprised when she bunches Harry's shirt in her fist and _shoves_ —Harry stumbles back, his mouth in an O.

Elbow slung across his chest, pushing tight against his breastbone, she backs him in into the wall and holds him there. He's taller than her, but she has the upper hand and he is looking down his nose at her, shocked, utterly. His neck bends as if getting close as possible to study her will reveal her intentions, her masterplan, and they are so close they could kiss.

She pushes up his broken glasses, all the way up his scalp and into his hair.

Remus and Sirius flutter, useless and concerned, in the background.

Jet hair obeys gravity and, bending, it brushes her brow. She stands on tiptoe, bringing her forehead to rest squarely against his own. They could tickle eyelashes.

But in this position, Harry cannot run. Harry cannot hide. To look anywhere other than her eyes will make him cross-eyed. He'll focus; he'll listen:

"M'not leaving, Harry," she whispers. "Not ever. And you're not going anywhere."

 _In this life, I'll go, too_

And it's a good thing she has her elbow digging into his breastbone because Harry sags, face crumpling, and she catches his weight with all she has. "I've got you," she murmurs, over and over, until the words bleed together: _I've got you, I'vegotyou, got you, got you, youI'vegot._

And Ron comes diving in, ears pink, and lifts Harry—the air floods back into her lungs, she hadn't realized Harry's weight was crushing her—and their little cuckoobird nest is, for the moment, whole.

* * *

Hermione _gets_ Sirius. She gets the shadow of family.

She watches him watch the gnarled inked branches of his family tree. Just watch. He is still, eyes too dark to be unfocused.

He is haunted by those branches. By the sooty wand-blasted smudges.

 _Carter, Stark_

Hermione _gets_ this. The loss blankets her.

* * *

It's Halloween, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione sit together in the common room, cushions askew and tucked under elbows or slung over knees. Harry and Ron are playing Wizard's Chess, with Harry staring moodily into the fire during Ron's moves. Ron makes a noise of dismay and Hermione looks up over her Transfiguration essay, watching the firelight reflect in orange panes off of Ron's hair as he moves his queen, and satisfied, leans back into shadow.

No one else is up; everyone else is sleeping.

But Halloween has always been theirs—hers, and Ron's, and Harry's. Halloween has always been candelabras in the air, trolls and lies, nights in flame.

Halloween was the night Harry lost his parents. When Harry became the Boy-Who-Lived.

And Halloween, eleven years later, was the night the Boy-Who-Lived became someone's Harry: Ron's Harry, Hermione's Harry. And Ron is Harry's, Hermione's. And Hermione is theirs.

They own the night.

And perhaps it's the tension of this night, sticky and heavy and sullen and sacred, when Harry reaches over and touches Hermione's ankle, fingertips right on her anklebone. She stills, and Ron hushes, eyes wide.

Harry doesn't look at her, just at his three fingers on her skin, his thumb looping round. "You can keep your secrets, Hermione."

Hermione can't stop from shuddering from Harry's grasp— _secrets?_ She's been so careful—how could they know? _How could they see_?

And it is Ron who quakes her most when he speaks up, gruffly, "Sometimes—sometimes you get a look in your eye. Like Harry."

 _Little orphan cuckoobird Harry._

"Like," Ron finishes, his voice being swallowed up by the crackle of the fire. "Like you think you're alone in the world."

"But we're not leaving," Harry echoes, firelight sparking both of their faces golden. He and Ron quirk into identical, humorless smiles as he repeats her earlier words: " _Not ever. And you're not going anywhere._ "

She leaps from the couch so quickly, arms looping around Harry's neck and Ron's waist and she holds them, tighter tighter tighter, and when they finally release, Hermione feels weightless. She hadn't realized—hadn't realized how heavily, how tightly, how embedded she had been carrying Howard Stark and Peggy Carter beneath her skin.

"Guys," she breathes, "I have something to tell you."

* * *

Hermione blames Umbridge for many things—terrorizing the school, fascist bigotry, ruining the color pink for Hermione _forever_ —but one crime Hermione wants to fasten to Umbridge is really all on her: it's November, and she hasn't thought of Peggy Carter or Howard Stark since Halloween.

Her boys took it surpisingly well—stories of Americans and soldiers with Ron's questions interrupting her faltering sorrow—"wait, does this mean you're American now? _Hot._ "—and tales of another world and wormholing time—"well, we always knew you're brilliant, Hermione, but we never knew it was because you're an _alien"_ which launched Hermione into a tirade about parallel worlds and parallel timestreams, using parchment and a quill to lecture about wormholes, until Ron rolled his eyes and launched a cushion at her face, starting a pillowwar which ended in dizzy laughter and floating feathers and Hermione realized that the past doesn't matter. Not now.

Are Howard Stark and Peggy Carter her past, she wonders? How can they be anything but, with the stones of Hogwarts vibrating from this tension. Umbridge. _I must not tell lies._ Harry's dreams. Trelawney gone. _I must respect my elders._ Sirius, antsy on Dumbledore's leash.

Christmas, with Ron's dad in the hospital—his torso all pale-bitten—and Ron and Harry at the Grimmauld Place, is the loneliest she's had. She's with her parents. Finally, she's with Mama and Daddy, in the house that has her _Chronicles of Narnia_ stashed under Mama's newspapers and Daddy's eyeglass case (he needs eyeglasses now, imagine that).

Weaker eyes, cornea-driven eyes, and his temples have shoots of gray. And in Mama's hands, the veins stand out, blue-green compressed cords in pale. Five years ago, Mama's hands didn't look like that. (Hermione wonders too if underneath the perm and hair dye if Mama is also going gray or white or ashy.)

They're all getting older, and this Christmas, they feel it.

Christmas morning is unusually solemn. Hermione was never raised religious—far from it—and out of Mama and Daddy, Daddy is the one most inclined to smoky prayer, with Mama and Hermione cooling in the embers of their thoughts; Mama is Jewish only by blood but still through December she lights the Menorah for her family that Auschwitz took.

So their cuckoobird nest has never been _religious_ , in the truest sense of the word. Religion is not faith to them. Faith is spangled shields and cold fashioned-iron and a world at peace.

Christmas they talk of peace and open gifts next to a real fir tree with blue electric bulbs. The lights are hypnotic, a blue so bright it is almost white, and looking at it, Hermione feels a stir—a blue so cold it shapes ice from air, and for a moment she almost believes in Divination—

But this must be a memory. A fragment flashback.

Maybe something at last—at last—from the years the whirlpool took.

But those sunspots of memory, reflected on the back of her eyelids, fade as soon as Mama sighs and fixates onto Hermione. Mama looks coiled, kneeling amongst the reds and greens and silvers of shiny wrappings and tissue paper, empty cardboard at her feet. Scattered around are piles of brightly colored woolen sweaters and hats, sugar-free sweets, and Hermione's top three wishlist books: von Clausewit's _Vom Kreige_ , an autographed co[y of _Reinventing Warfare 1914-1918: Novel Munitions and Tactics of Trench Warfare,_ and Sun Tzu's _The Art of War._

Mama runs her hand over _The Art of War's_ cover, but each finger is flexed, tense.

Hermione realizes then that she should have been more subtle.

"How bad is it in this wizard's world?" Mama demands. "The truth now."

Daddy twitches in his armchair, half moving forward in protest and half hovering for Hermione's answer.

 _The truth now_. Now or never.

Her mouth dry of saliva, Hermione answers slowly, remembering Penelope and dead Cedric and poor Arthur. "Bad. It's bad."

Mama's face twists so suddenly into grief and back if Hermione hadn't been watching, she would've missed it. "Bad," she nods, repeats. "Bad." Mama's gaze goes to the menorah on the mantle. "How bad exactly, love?" She asks, and it is so quiet.

Hermione knows Mama is thinking of Auschwitz.

Each word coming in its own puff of air, its own exhalation, Hermione answers her hidden cuckoobird truth. "Not as bad as you think. But soon."

Umbridge wants Hogwarts but Voldemort wants the world.

Daddy is angry then, rising to his feet, shouting, "No!" His pupils are pinpricks. "We've escaped two wars already. Your parents gave up _everything_ for just the shot at peace—they gave you to us—they ENTRUSTED YOU TO US!" He runs a hand through his hair, half of it standing on end, muttering about plans:"We'll go to Australia. Or America. _Fuckin'_ _Timbuktu_. We'll hide, we'll live. You're not the center of it."

Hermione's breath catches— _no. Harry._

"She's not," Mama realizes slowly, swallowing her own air. "But…the Potter boy must be."

Mama knows that for Hermione, there is no turning back.

This is the moment Hermione watches her parents lose her. Hermione-their-daughter becomes Hermione-the-soldier. 16-old Hermione facing soldiers in black facemasks and death in their blood. Their baby, Hermione.

Mama kneels in front of Hermione, head bowed, and Hermione whispers to the traitorous part of her soul that wants to weep and beg and apologize, apologize, apologize— _think of Penelope._

Hermione meets Mama's broken heart with the courage that comes when one has everything to lose. But still—

 _I'm sorry,_ she mouths. She can't bring herself to voice it aloud.

"You are every inch your father's daughter," Daddy says then, and while there's pride floating to the top of his voice, it is weighted by absolute horror, and she knows he means Howard Stark.

"Her mother's daughter," Mama corrects. "Peg was the underdog's soldier. And Steve."

Steve, soldier of the free and brave.

"Your daughter," Hermione corrects, all air. "Your daughter, always."

It's the first time that statement has felt absolutely, utterly true.

Mama nods, once, short. "What do you need from us?" she asks briskly, and Daddy hangs his head in defeat.

What does Hermione need? _Hermione needs them safe._

Mama and Daddy pause, heads slightly cocked, awaiting Hermione's orders.

* * *

Sirius is dead.

Sirius is dead, Sirius just _died_ , yet Hermione cannot think on him and his loose stubble-grin.

No, Sirius is dead and Umbridge is gone but _Harry lives_ and Hermione is in Hogwarts hospital wing, but Hermione can only think of the Department of Mysteries and the rows of bell-jarred time-turners, some as small as fingernails and one as large as an infant, but all sticky honey-gold and even now, Hermione's thoughts and mind feel _stuck_ , snagged on a trail of taffy nectar and dust.

In that chamber, she had felt her own heartbeat and heard it echo, then echo, then echo, stuttered in between with the same heartbeat caught in a time-lag of half of a second ahead, half of a second behind, lapsing and leaping, sound and time and self caught in that time sludge.

"Do you hear that?" she had hissed to Neville. Neville and Harry had returned her look blankly.

"Hermione," Neville had blushed, blushing even though they had just committed illegal action at least five times over. "There's nothing to hear."

And staring at the time-turners, Hermione had felt the wormhole in her chest expand and answer— _Hermione is wormholes, Hermione is gold fire, Hermione is time and flame and fury. Hermione is yours._

Then Dolohov had arrived and slashed her open with blueflame cannonballs, white-blue as the Christmas lights, and as her world had dimmed, Hermione reached across the void and _touched_ and unraveled.

And all she can think about now in the midst of all this grief and death is that fathomless touch.

* * *

Author's Note: Thank you all—it's not long now before worlds collide.


	4. Chapter 4: Hogwarts' Children Part III

Disclaimer: I do not own anything in the Harry Potter or Marvel Cinematic Universe. This story is set Pre- _Iron Man_.

Happy Pride Month, y'all.

Sixth Year

* * *

Every moment of Sixth Year feels intangible—dreamlike, diluted watercolor, so surreal that Hermione feels petrified again. There was a touch across a void that is more indefinable than it is definable, a soul-touch of recognition, fire and its answering dark.

Darkness that is a question, not an answer.

And there are the heartbeat drums that follow her wherever she goes, sticky with time. Her heartbeat that is not just her heartbeat, a rhythmical chant. It thunders, _you don't belong here, you don't belong here—_

And Hermione screams into her stomach, _justletmesaveHarry!,_ but the answering rush thunders in her temples, _you don't belong, here you don't belong._

But she must save Harry—and she is afraid now:

Sirius, dead. Dumbledore, blackfingered. Malfoy, bolder. His daddy's in Azkaban with the rest of the Deatheaters, Deatheaters that held their wand at her throat, Deatheaters that slashed her open.

She has a scar from that night. That seems to be the most tangible thing to her now—ropy and blue-veined, traveling from collarbone to navel, as wide as her thumb. At night she touches its oyster-meat silk and feels the drumbeats muffle—as if, instead of the pounding in temple and ear canal, she is only feeling, three-fingered, for a green veined pulse at the wrist—the only thing that roots her in this moment and this time and this world.

 _you don't belong here,_ drum, _you don't belong here_

* * *

It's Harry, perceptive thing, that notices.

They're in Charms, Harry to the right, Ron to the left, when the drumming gets loud enough to pop her jaw and spark tears. At the board, Professor Flitwick writes out spells, unconcerned, but Hermione fumbles with her quill, fumbles with her seat, and her desk muddles between her desk and a gold haze, and everything is black and blue and sugar-spun gold, and she wedges her hand at her heart, feeling for the scar, fingers spastic as goldfish fins, and when she feels its smoothness—like volcanic glass—she shudders, calms.

She is real, she is here, she is here here here.

She doesn't unravel.

And Harry—her Harry—has his hand on her knee, which will do nothing for the rumors, and with his other hand he is threading his fingers through her hair. And she risks a glance up at him, her vision still sunspotted with gold flecks, and sees his glasses are askew, almost dangling off one ear, eyes wild and careless and concerned, and he is mouthing over and over, _got you._

 _She is real, she is here, she is here here here._

* * *

"Why didn't you tell us," Ron asks, ears red. He's furious. "Why the hell didn't you tell us?"

The drums dance around his words.

Hermione fights against a shrug—it's too careless a gesture, but her skull _aches_. And besides—she _doesn't know, okay?_

It's not because she doesn't trust them; she does. It's not because she wanted a secret for herself; she has too many.

Even Lavender Brown draped over Ron like a second shirt isn't why.

Later, in her bed, curtains shut, Hermione is able to boil down the _why:_ she is afraid—afraid that telling them would sound like goodbye.

 _you don't belong here,_ drum, _you don't belong here_

* * *

Ron pulls away from Hermione after that. He pulls from Harry, too, but mostly Hermione. Harry shrugs, but Harry's always shrugged during their fights, because when it comes down to it, Ron is not only Brother and Best Friend, he is also Roommate, and except for Fourth Year, Harry always keeps the peace. So Harry shrugs and tries to mediate, but it's from a distance, and Ron is hurt by her secrets, she knows, hurt to the tip of his too-red ears, and he has Lav-Lav Brown to coddle that hurt.

Which _hurts._

Though Hermione observes Harry watch Ron-and-Lav-Lav and Ginny-and-Dean, and how his eyes drift over Ginny's copper hair to Ron's legs (and worryingly, _Draco's_ ), and she wonders if she's not the only one who's hurting.

Keeping the peace is a lonely job, and Hermione is lonely, even though she still writes Viktor letters. He sends two feet of parchment each time, all written in his cramped black handwriting, like a row of beetles on the page. She even prefers this distance in their relationship, because it means she can write down any secret—save for the secrets Carter, Stark, and blue wormholes—and safely release it Bulgaria. She tells him about her feelings for Ron, about her love for Harry, even about her not-so obvious crush on Fleur.

 _You should write her,_ Viktor says, never jealous.

She adores that: jealousy turns Ron into a caveman.

 _And what would I even say?_ Hermione writes back. _Hello, we've briefly met, and I'm mooning on you from afar like bloody Roger Davies? (or Ron Weasley). No,_ Hermione slashes, the ink dribbling from her quill, _if we meet again, then I'll talk to her._

In return, Viktor tells her of his secret love for all things mechanical, and when she tells him of Sirius' ( _and oh that hurts_ ) old motorbike, his next parchment explodes with his dreams and questions— _Hermione, the gears, magical, no? Or perhaps the whole motor itself?_ or _It must be the fuel, an animation potion?_ or _One exhaust pipe or two?_ Viktor's dream, she learns, is to build a magical mechanical shop. Once Quidditch is over, once he goes to school. It's always _Once's_ with Victor; they have that in common. Hermione's letters focuses on her _Once's_ too: _Once the war is over, once Voldemort is gone, once the Ministry is reformed…_

Viktor's not a soldier, not like Hermione. He doesn't understand how deeply she will bleed for this war. But he's a good friend, a trusted friend (and more), but his letters have been coming less and less frequently. The last one was a month ago:

 _we are wide-awake souls_ (she always suspected Viktor was a poet) _in a world that is dreaming._ _скъпа_ —sweetheart— _find someone_ _who can see like you do. I blink, you pass me by._

(It's the sweetest _we should see other people_ Hermione's ever heard.)

* * *

But yes, she's lonely.

So she invites blonde-and-strong tree trunk Cormac McLaggen, and even though she finds his swagger repulsive, he sure _looks_ pretty (a bit, if she's honest, like Cedric; a bit, if she's honest, like the Captain America of the photographs—granite jaw and wheat-and-cream coloring). So she wears a dress, violet, that dips low in the back and rises high in the front—to hide her scar—and at a hidden alcove at Slughorn's Christmas party, when McLaggen leans in, she leans in too.

Hot tongues meet freckled skin and whiskers and lips and teeth. Hard muscle, firm fingers. She curls her lips into her smile and then her tongue into an invitation.

Orange daze, tangerine taste.

She lets McLaggen's hand dip lower and lower, slip in to her waist, but when his calloused hands brush rough-rough over her belly and find her scar, the difference between her skin and scar is stark—like crème brulee, a hard sugar shell meeting softer-than-velvet cream.

He pulls away, disgusted.

She stumbles back, confused.

McLaggen reaches for her again, but Hermoine is _gone—_ racing from their alcove, embarrassment red on her cheeks and flushing on her chest, colliding bodily into Harry, her black hole crackling and exploding vol-au-vents. Tearing past, tearily past, she runs, and _alohomora,_ Hermione ducks into the library.

It's quiet here, the dust settling in the air and colonizing on the tomes no one but Hermione checks out. Madam Pince has retired for the night. There is a faint light from the window-panes but when it falls it is blue diagonals: the room cast in indigo prisms.

It feels holy here. It feels safe. This is her temple.

She tucks into the ancient history section, breathes in the dust, and folds her knees to her scabby chest.

 _How could she have been so stupid?_ Drums like hummingbird wings, too soft and too quick to focus on, pulse high in her throat.

Stupid McLaggen and his flinch, and stupid her for flinching back; Hermione rubs her scar, _soothe, soothe, soothe._

Little sobs leak out of Hermione, gusts of air from a too-tight balloon. It feels right crying. Like it's something that's long overdue, and when she's done, she feels lesser, but it's a good kind of lesser, a lesser that means Hermione is a little bit less Hermione-with-the-worries-and-cares-and-lies.

She wishes for Ron or Fleur, Harry or Victor. Ginger or silver, black or brown.

But it's a pale-blonde head that swims into Hermione's vision: Luna. Luna (Looney—though Hermine regrets that, regrets that immensely) Lovegood, Ravenclaw, who followed Hermione from the party. Hermione ducks her face to hide her tears, but at Luna's voice, the drums soften further, a whispering tarantella.

"Hermione," Luna says, and it's all musicality, silver windchimes on each syllable. "Do you mind if I join you?"

Hermione sniffles, scrubs her face with two hands, and glares red-eyed at Luna. "There's a whole library here, Luna. I'd rather be alone, thanks."

Luna smiles that distant half-smile. "Your nargles and my nargles are compatible, I think." And she floats down to her knees, her dressrobes all floaty tinsel and lavender.

Hermione laughs, and it comes out in a gurgled choke. "You…you look like a Christmas ornament." _An ornament on the Christmas tree, snow outside, and silver bangling in her ears._

It's a compliment of the highest order: Luna, for all of her oddness, looks completely and utterly fittingly _right_. Something Hermione has not felt like in the longest time.

Right now, Luna is everything Hermione is not, and Hermione _wants_ it.

Wants Luna, sweet, smart, wise Luna, with her skin smooth as a just ripe-cherry, and Hermione wants to lean in, taste—

And so she does.

And Luna is soft as eyelashes, and those lashes are blonde and long, luminescent, with strands of tinsel caught in them, and it is starlight sunshine, a cold that burns volcanic inside her gut, _licorice tongue_ , and Luna somehow knows she doesn't want her scar touched, so Hermione leaves the dress on, hikes up her skirt in hills of tulle, clever Luna with her clever hands: there are streamers in Hermione's bloodstream, bloodbursts of trapped breath, curling her toes into question marks and then commas— _comma_ , _comma_ , a rising and a falling, an & and &—building clefts and cliffs and crimson stretching skyward of the horizon, cherry inferno, and who knew Luna could grin so _wickedly_ —and then and then and then: _arterial confetti_

and when its done and they are both cooling in their embering sweat, so cold that Hermione swears she could lick snowflakes off Luna's shoulder, Hermione knows that even though she doesn't like Luna like _that_ (like Ron or Fleur), she definitely likes Luna like _this_ (sweetly wicked and clever as hell). Luna arched underneath her, legs tangled, and they breathe stardust.

The drums are silent.

* * *

They don't talk about it after, and they don't talk about it inbetween, because Luna seems to _get_ Hermione anyway, so surely she gets that Hermione has her eyes on other horizons. Luna's not the person Hermione's heart wants (Hermione is Hermione though her heart and her body are two different things) but Luna's a person, a friend.

Hermione kisses Luna's cheek before they leave the library, breathes a thank you. "You're absolutely lovely," she says, because Luna is, good to her soul.

They don't talk about it, and they smile.

* * *

And then it is Christmas hols, and she goes home, jauntily, all a-twinkle, and before she steps onto the train, she turns in the snowflaking air, and blows an ice-dust kiss to Hogwarts—to Luna, to Ron, to Harry.

But at home, that joy dissipates: she is painfully aware that this might her last holiday with her parents: Dumbledore is positively _withering_ now. His hand looks like a roasting stick half-burnt to ash.

Hermione hasn't voiced this to Ron or, Merlin-forbid, to Harry, but she firmly believes that this will be the year they lose Dumbledore.

They will lose their leader, and she's seen enough of Mama and Daddy's pinched-faced reminiscing to know what happens when your leader topples to his grave.

But Hermione has her plan in place. Protect Harry, protect Ron, protect the small, and protect her family.

(It means nothing that she lists her family last—they are everything. And she will do everything to protect them: so many muggles family have disappeared; and Hermione knows that through Harry, she has painted a giant target on their backs.)

The plan she made has Mama and Daddy incognito, hidden, living fake lives until after the war.

( _If there is an after.)_

They won't be obliviated—that is their one request. Let them keep the Grangers (the selves that remember Hermione's rubber ducky and picking apples off their tree) and the Jarvises (the selves that remember Howard, Peggy, Steve).

Mama and Daddy have obtained new passports, false identities. They're an old pro at this, anyway, but her guilt rises anew when she discovers Mama poring over her new passport in the loo. Mama's kneeling, cold tile beneath her and cold porcelain to her back, hairpins askew. There's heartbreak in Mama's eyes as she traces the new picture in her passport (Hermione hasn't looked at it—it's better if she doesn't know).

Mama catches Hermione looking and snaps the passport shut. "I'll have to dye my hair again," she laughs, dabbing where the tears have run down. Then: "I won't look like your mum anymore."

Hermione crumples into Mama's lap, looping her arms round and round. This her mum. _This her mum._

"It's my favorite thing," Mama whispers wetly. "Looking like your mum. My favorite thing."

And Hermione turns sideways in her embrace, curling as if she was a child, the baby Mama never saw, and she kisses up at Mama, grazing the underside of Mama's jaw. It's wet, and Mama sqeezes her tight, tight, curling Hermione into herself, and in turn Hermione locks her knees and elbows, and they rock and cry and rock. Mama's heart beats against Hermione's ear, separated only by skin.

There is a break where they catch their breath and snuffle and Hermione can't apologize for the pain she causes Mama because the pain will save Harry, and she can't say thank you for the pain either, because Mama is hurting and it strikes Hermione to her core, lancing her clear through armpit and swollen heart.

So instead Hermione blurts, "I had sex. With Luna. Sex with Luna. I liked it."

And the surprise that races across Mama's face is chased off by sheer delight, fast as hounds after the fleet fox. Mama laughs, tossing her head back, and her smile is so big Hermione can see her molars.

"Did you now? And you liked it? I'm glad." Mama smiles, rolling out each word with her tongue: " _Sex with Luna_. Have we met this Luna?"

Hermione blushes, bites her tongue with pleased embarrassment. It's not that she was nervous to tell Mama, but it's the first she's told _anybody_ , and she's not sure what this means, and there's a lurch inside of her, gold threads blotchy with blackness, and her breath catches—

"Breathe, darling," Mother cries, sharply on the _breathe_ and soothing on the _darling_. "Breathe!"

And Hermione finds herself swimming in the green-and-blue tiles of the loo, blue that Daddy had picked, green that Mama had picked, smeared against the soft lilac towels that Hermione had wanted. Her lungs pump and her vision sets, and there is Mama, soft brown hair curling above Hermione and mixing with her own.

Her Mama.

"Oh, darling," Mama sighs against Hermione's forehead. "Love is _love_ and sex is _sex_ and sometimes they're separate and sometimes love _is_ sex. Love's a spectrum, and—you are important, darling, know that. And what you want and who you like is important, too."

Hermione feels that this is right, but still she squirms. "I didn't _love_ Luna," she confesses. "I like her, and I love touching her, holding her, and her touching me, but it's not—"

 _Not the passion, the fire, the daze—for Ron who snogs Lavender; for Harry who stares at Ron; for Fleur, almost certainly dating Bill (and yeah, she's jealous. Who wouldn't be?)._

"Not a worry, my little love," Mama says, squeezing her tighter. "You love the person. _Bisexual._ Let the chemical be chemical."

"Yes," Hermione says slowly—this is the language she needed. Her feelings explained. "Yes, I love the person."

Then, wistfully: "Luna is sweet—dotty, maybe—and so so lovely."

"I wish I could meet her," Mama says, softer. Her fingers strum against Hermione's cheeks like they are guitar strings.

"I wish you could meet her, too," Hermione answers, honestly.

"And that Krum boy and Harry?" Mama asks slyly. Hermione shifts up against Mama's thigh, warm against the coolness of the tile.

"You've already met Harry," Hermione protests. "And Ron."

"Not like this. Not like yours." Mama's gaze is deep, poring and yet porous. Hermione is reminded that Mama would have made a very good spy. She pictures her, Mama as Anna Jarvis, wearing shades of gray and rose—fedora and felt suit and pistol, the lipstick in her purse clinking around iron bullets. "You're waiting until the end of the war, aren't you. Before chasing what you want." _Ron, Fleur._

Yes.

The war will bring devastation, she knows. And if there's an after, she hopes she will still recognize Ron as Ron, Fleur as Fleur, Harry as Harry.

But she's afraid that she won't. Admitting this to herself again is to admit that this word AFRAID has become the foundation block of her vocabulary. Take it out and _jenga—_ it all falls down.

"You're so much like your mother," Mama confesses. "Peg waited, too. Too long."

Hermione doesn't understand. Waited for Howard? Too long? But she abandons that train of thought to embrace what Mama says next, words that leave her warm and fluffy as those lilac towels:

"You're a also a lot like me."

* * *

Christmas morning passes without much fanfare. They forgo presents. Everything is grim and grayset, and even the twinkle lights seem dull: Hermione's plan goes in place that afternoon.

The plan: use the distraction that is Christmas—the clogged artery that is airports, bus stops, train stations—for Mama and Daddy née Granger née Jarvis to walk out of Hermione's life. To safety. To save their lives.

Hermione's fingers are bitten to the quick. She hates this. She hates that she thinks this is necessary. She hates herself.

Mama and Daddy load up their Ford Escort three hours earlier than scheduled.

"This isn't the schedule," Hermione protests, waving her nail-bitten fingers and scrubbing her red rimmed eyes. Her parents don't look much better.

Daddy loads their suitcases into the car. It will look like they're just making a holiday excursion, _over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother's house they go._ "Well, your mother and I talked, and there's something we need to do before we can leave you to this _bloody war._ "

Daddy's voice is reduced to something feral, all growl and guttural. His eyes are twice as bloodshot as Hermione's. "None of your fretting. Just get in the damn car." He circles the car twice before getting in.

His fingers are dirty half-moons. Hermione realizes with a start that he must've dug back up the metal box that contained their lives—the photographs of Anna and Edwin, Peggy and Howard, Capt. Rogers. Every year they've dug it up, added to it, and then buried it again. The box now contains Hermione's refrigerator finger-paintings, a pair of Anna's earrings, a Tic Tac box with Hermione's baby teeth, movie stubs to the re-release of _Casablanca_ , a lumpy purple bunny that Anna knitted and was so horrifying Hermione and Daddy buried it in secret, the bell to Hermione's first bike…

It's a time capsule of their life, dug up again.

Did Daddy pack it with him, she wonders? Or did he add something to it, bury it, trusting that one day, he can come back?

She wishes she was brave enough to ask him— _Gryffindor courage, Hermione_.

Mama comes out of the house, her brown hair loose and wild. By the end of the day, Mama will have dyed it blonde or gray or her once-red, and maybe she'll cut it, too—Hermione will have no idea of what Mama will even look like. Couldn't even pick her out of a crowd.

Mama's face is white but she settles into the passenger seat with silent grace. Then she curses, doubles back to the house to make sure it is locked. It's an action that is more habit than purpose—what does it matter if the house is locked? No one will be contacted if is robbed, no one will be there to mow the grass or repaint the porch.

"Alright, then," Mama says, settling back in, and that is that.

Daddy twists the key more forcefully than it needs to and the engine roars to life. They pull out of the driveway. Mama bows her head, murmurs something soft and heavy in Hebrew.

Hermione watches from the backseat, numbly curious. It sounds like a prayer, and they do not pray.

Mama twists round ninety degrees, one hand on Daddy's shoulder and one hand on Hermione's knee. She translates: " _Keep far from us all evil; may our paths be free from all obstacles from when we go out until we return home._ "

"And give them hell," Daddy intones, arching his shoulder under Mama's hand.

"Amen," Hermione breathes. "Amen."

Daddy switches from reverse to drive so quickly there is crunch that is certainly the transmission (Hermione should tell Victor, he'll be horrified), but the car gamely thunders away, pulling out of the street where Hermione once skinned her knee by falling from her bicycle. Their yellow-and-white house contracts to the size of a postage stamp, and as soon as they turn left, it will disappear entirely.

They make the turn, Daddy's eyes on the rearview mirror, Mama's hand on the windowglass, Hermione's teeth bloodying her tongue.

* * *

Mama and Daddy take her to an old pond, a pond they've summered at twice. Hermione grew up here—she knows the rushes where she caught a bullfrog, green as apples, and where the shore is thin enough she can sit on a rock and let her feet dangle so that the fish, small as toenail clippings, can nibble on the dried skin flaking from her toes.

Better than a pedicure, Mama always said.

But this winter the pond looks hard, unfamiliar—a winter wonderland that crinkles in shards and sharp angles, wedges of unforgiving ice. The ice is blue-clear patchwork around the edges and a white handkerchief in the center.

Mama hands her a pair of ice skates, brand new. A red ribbon winds around the silver blades, sharp as kitchen knives.

A Christmas present.

"We're going ice skating?" Hermione asks, confused. The drive here was particularly solemn. No music, just Mama and Daddy white-knuckling the steering wheel or dashboard. She's never so much as rollerbladed before, and now they're skating on a rough unpolished pond?

"No," Mama says. "Just you. Strap up."

Hermione obediently straps up and then Mama gently steers her to where the ice has flowered whitely, thickly. But Hermione feels like a foal. Her knees knock into Mama's and it's only her grip on Mama's coat that keeps her from falling down.

Daddy lingers on the shore, hands in his pockets. Head down.

"Wait—" Hermione calls, and there's panic steaming to her brain. "You're not coming?"

"Mm," Mama hums in her ear. "No, darling. This is practice. Now skate."

And Hermione is all giraffe legs, legs sliding, and as she pushes away from Mama on the ice, it is all she can do to not faceplant.

"Practice?! But you're not skating!" Hermione shrieks, and on the other side of the pond, roosting birds fly away. She's flustered, bewildered. Mama ice skated, Daddy ice skated. Why aren't they skating now?

 _What the hell?_

Mama's voice comes from far away—she must be on the shore with Daddy. "Practice for us," she says.

 _What?_ Hermione swivels round to catch a glimpse of the shore but the blades fly out from under her, and ice lunges up to meet her kneecap and cheek. Hermione hears a _crunch_ but is unsure of whether it is her bones or the ice.

She stays there, dazed, blinking into the ice with its new flecks of red. " _Mum?"_ she calls, and her tongue feels thick.

"Here, darling!" It's a sob. "Keep skating."

Something is wrong. Her head gongs. There is copper in her mouth.

Hermione struggles to her feet, almost standing before she has to take a knee. She looks to the shore. Mama is kneeling in the snow, hands pressed over her mouth. Daddy is pacing, turning, gripping his hair.

 _What is happening_?

She totters towards them, spitting redly on the ice. _Keep skating, Hermione._ Something purposeful is obviously happening here. _Keep skating, Hermione._ She doesn't understand but she still turns away to the rest of the pond.

She falls again. She catches herself with her wrist, jarring bone to bone to ice. Her tongue feels like a clapper, her brain a bell. _Dong dong dong._

There's a shout, Daddy's shout, and looking up, Hermione sees that Mama is gripping Daddy's jacket. Like keeping him in place.

 _Something purposeful is obviously happening._

" _This is practice, Hermione."_

Hermione gets up again, defiant. Swiveling, swaying her weight, she manages to get halfway round the pond before the blade catches on a snag of ice. Down she goes.

She blinks for a while into the ice. She's dangerously close to the thin blue patches of ice, and there are bits of gravel glassed beneath her fingers. The dark of the water beneath. She could fall clear through, and possibly her parents couldn't get to her in time.

" _This is practice, Hermione._ "

Painfully and instantly, like a flash of the Cruciatus, Hermione understands. This isn't practice for her.

This is practice for parents leaving their child alone to pain and struggle and, maybe, death. Mama and Daddy are raw nerves: this will be their everyday existence for the rest of the war.

They cannot help her. They can only wait, pray.

Hermione-the-soldier understands. This is a test.

Well, Hermione has always aced her tests.

So she tightens her calf, pressures her toes, wills with every fiber in her being to _balance_ , _balance_ , and she sways, _left, right, left, right_ , a swing of this leg and then that.

 _Show them that she can fall and bleed and then get back up._

She skates: circles the pond entire, winter wind lifting her hair like she is flying on a broom, and she is Wendy-bird flying away to Never-Neverland: a land where everything will be the same and nothing changes.

Her parents cheer. Daddy whoops, fist in the air. Mama covers her mouth with one hand and slaps the snow with the other, once twice three times.

Hermione doesn't so much brake in front of them as she does float to a stop. Daddy's cheek has the imprint of his own fingernails and Mama's wool scarf is shredded yarn at the ends. But they look at her with such pride, such trust.

She probably has a concussion, but this will be _nothing_ compared to the war. Besides, they need this—she circles round again.

* * *

The drive to the train station is a short one—too short.

"You've missed your calling, darling," Daddy teases, when they are arriving at the train station. "Anna, we had a Junior Olympian all along. What fools we were." And they all laugh, heightened and forced and shrill.

Hermione had dry-swallowed three aspirin, but she has long stopped feeling the pain. She just feels numb. The drumming is in her pulse and ears. _You don't belong here_ —but she eats that thought as soon as it comes. Who does she belong with if not with Mama and Daddy?

They unload into the front lobby, which spirals into different gateways and destinations and a bison row of trains. Hermione purposefully avoids the screen with the destinations flashing greenly—though this will be just one stop of many for her parents, any knowledge of their destination could be forced out during torture. So she watches her trainers, and follows Mama's wicked and sharp black heels and Daddy's worn loafers.

The black heels pause in the midst of a hallway, so Hermione does too, and the loafers step out of view.

"Where's he going?" Hermione asks. Her voice sounds thick and clumpy, tapioca pudding throat.

"It's safe to look up, darling dearest." Hermione does. She focuses on Mama and Mama only and the rest of the station swims in Technicolor behind her.

"Your dad will be back. He saw something—a present." Each of her mother's words have a toothy gap between them, like each word must be punctuated with meaning and intention. "This is for you."

Mama pulls a letter, no envelope, from her coatpocket. Hermione knows without opening it that will be handwritten, on Mama's signature periwinkle stationary. Hermione turns it over in her hands. It's been thrice folded, and tied with yellow ribbon. "It's not for now," Mama says sternly. "It's for when you need it."

Then Mama cups Hermione's face as gently as if she water. "Promise me," Mama says, eyes bright. "Promise me that you will not open that letter until you need it."

"I promise." _Heart in mouth._

And suddenly Daddy is pressing into their shoulders, and they are a tripod, a triangle, a pyramid— _the strongest of all the shapes._ He pulls a snowglobe out a brown paper sack. "Here, love—just bought it. So you remember this day." _So you remember us_ is left unspoken.

Hermione cradles, shakes it. Glitter seas rise into glitter skies and as the dazzle settles, Hermione sees that is of a family ice skating. It's not a perfect match—this family is a family of five, a child on the father's shoulders and two twins on a sled, but there's a brunette child in the middle with curls like hers.

"Okay," she whispers. "Um, alright, okay." And if she collapses into their pyramid, Mama convexing over, Daddy a ceiling over them both, who can blame her?

"This isn't goodbye," Daddy whispers to the top of her head. "We aren't saying goodbye." _Goodbye_.

 _Oh!_ Hermione hiccups, reaching for her back pocket. "I almost forgot! My surprise for you."

It's the last step of her plan.

She pulls out the two rings, looping them both on her pointer finger. They're both simple yellow gold rings, indistinguishable: her parents' wedding rings from the world before.

Hermione had asked for them last Christmas, and Mama and Daddy had, looking at each other, slipped their rings off that very minute. "Whatever you need, darling," they had said.

Gold is soft, good for rune work, and yellow gold is best. She worked all year, carving gnat-small runes inside the band, boosting her Protean charms. And then her hat trick—beyond the Protean charm, and its signal boost, she charmed their outer rims to be as sensitive as arm skin.

She has a matching ring now, charmed to be dichotomous of each ring.

Hermione slides the rings from her finger to Mama and Daddy. Their gratitude at seeing their rings—a symbol, a societal construct, but oh how their eyes glisten. Mama pushes Daddy's ring into place, kissing his knuckles; Daddy does the same for her, hovering his lips right over the ring; Hermione feels jolts of warmth on her finger.

"Oh, wait—" Hermione starts, fumbling over the mechanics and the science. "It's sensitive. To me. For emergencies, you can scratch on the rings and I'll be able to read it."

She can practically see the relief flooding from their pores.

"This is what you were working on? Oh baby you're so brilliant—" Mama cries.

Daddy, always prepared with a fountain pen, swivels around, trench coat to them, and there's a _scritch scratch._

And slowly, shakily, a fire blooms on her finger, hot enough to burn, and though her finger trembles and tears leak, Hermione does not look away from the slow letters branding across the ring:

 _L_

 _O_

 _V_

 _E_

 _Y_

 _O_

 _U_

And Mama kisses her ring too, and a flare burns through Hermione redly.

"Love you both," Hermione mouths, salt on her lips, copper on her lips. Her black hole pulses and everything that Hermione is stamps it down, trying to swallow this feeling into the bulk of her, into her gradually frizzing hair and tight lungs.

Daddy's watch beeps, interrupting. All color vanishes from his face: "That's the train. Oh God. That's the train. Oh God."

"It will be fine. It will be fine. I'll be fine," Hermione repeats over and over in stacatto, and Daddy looks waxen, dead.

"The rings!" Hermione stutters suddenly, gasping for air with the realization of _the most important information_. "Their shelf life lessens with each use. We can't use it up. And our code—"

"999," Mama affirms, gripping Hermione's fluttering hands, right over her new bruises, and presses them to her own cheek. "For emergencies or attacks or if we need you…or if you need us."

Panic and dread realization curtains them all. This is it.

Daddy's watch beeps again, insistent.

"I love you I love you I love you Iloveyou, please don't leav—" And Hermione breaks. She can't be Hermione-the-Soldier. _They're leaving, all according to her plan, yes, but THEY'RE LEAVING._

"—Brave lion girl." Mama interrupts softly, drawing herself tall, floor-to-ceiling, as if she were one of these columns. Wet-eyed, Mama outstretches her hand, palm tight and fingers rigid. A handshake, respect, from equal to equal.

Hermione swallows back her tears, her words— _Gryffindor courage_ —and slowly reaches out, palm to palm, and she is shocked at how small her fingers are in Mama's hand.

"Well done, my love," Mama says, squeezing, pumping her hand up and down once. Wonder and sorrow battle in her eyes. "You are my girl. Mine. You are going to fight and you will do everything you can to survive— _everything, do you hear me?_ — and you will save the world, and—and then you will come _home_."

Daddy opens his mouth, but out comes a sob. His voice cracks and he takes off his cap and buries his face in it. He just nods, pressing his hand from Hermione's shoulder to her face to her hair and back again, over and over. He presses his hand to his heart, like one would do to a flag.

And his watch beeps one last time and Mama _wails,_ before turning away and clamping her hands over her mouth.

"Don't watch," Mama says with her face turned as Daddy grabs the luggage. "Look at the ground, love. Don't watch."

And Hermione _can't breathe_ there are so many tears. _Please don't leave, no please don't leave, I'm not brave enough for this!_

But she follows orders, good little soldier, covers her face with her hands. And she hears the click-clack of shoes, other shoes, not black heels or soft loafers, and there is a whistle and a bell and the sound of two men arguing and schoolchildren laughing and a luggage cart with a squeaky wheel—and there is tar in her veins, black studded with gold, slowing her down, telling her to _breathe, breathe_. Follow the breath tunneling blue through her nostrils, down to wear it sticks to her tarpaper lungs. Gold flecks, gold breaths. She feels for her scar. It's as warm as her ring.

 _Breathe, breathe._ It's silent around her. Noise has stopped.

She cautiously unveils her hands, slick with sweat and tears, and blinks, and where Mama was standing is no Mama. And where Daddy was standing is no Daddy. The corridor is pale washed and empty, the rush for the train quiet for just this moment.

She is alone.

Hermione trembles as she hears the grinding rails, knowing her parents will be on one of these trains, any of these trains.

In the old films, it's the soldier who goes away—who boards the train, the ship, the plane, kissing loved ones, waving caps. They are the ones to leave.

Hermione knows why: being the ones who stay is unbearable.

* * *

School starts again. Hermione takes a cab to King's Cross by herself. No one notices.

Her rings don't warm, no messages. And she definitely doesn't feel her black hole shred her from the inside, her nightmares definitely don't newly froth, and her heart definitely doesn't break.

It's safer if they don't message, Hermione reminds herself.

Still.

* * *

School gives her the feeling she gets at the top of the rollercoaster—the ride up is great, look at the view, at its cotton candy clouds and gumball gulls. But no one fully thinks about that view on that slow climb: it's all about the precipice, the dangle. The fall.

Hogwarts is at the precipice. It will fall soon, she thinks. It's all she can think about.

Harry watches Draco with what borders on obsession. It's beyond sexual, now, she thinks. In the reflection of Harry's glasses, there are shadows of bone shards.

And then there is _Sectumsepra,_ and Draco nearly bleeds out in crushed porcelain _._ And Harry did it. Her Harry.

She knows how that anger feels but never thought she would see it on her fellow cuckoobird Harry. (When Harry tells her about it, alone, he cries. "I never thought there would be so much blood," he says. "I didn't mean to kill him.")

Maybe that's what bothers her so much about it. This is war. Muggles are going missing on the streets, muggleborns are burning in their own homes. If Harry was going to kill someone, Hermione can think of plenty of good reasons why he could mean it, even if— _especially if_ —that someone was Draco.

But there are horcruxes to worry about now. The splitting of one's soul, intentional or not. Perhaps Draco Malfoy would be worth that risk. Or perhaps he's just a schoolboy with too much power who hurts those who don't. Perhaps that's justification enough. He's sixteen though, she reminds herself. Younger than her. Sixteen.

Could she ever kill Malfoy?

(Hermione feels like she is at a precipice.)

* * *

Sometimes she catches Luna's eyes in the halls and that distant cow-eyed gaze sharpens, turns _positively salacious._

"Nargles," Luna will mouth to her.

"Nargles," Hermione will mouth back.

* * *

Then Ron almost _dies_. Her Ron, Harry's Ron.

He is lying on that hospital bed, throat scraped up from that bezoar, and Hermione gushes out like water from a pricked balloon— _"What were you thinking?_ Oh Ron,that was so dangerous—and I don't know if I said it before, but I'm sorry, I am really sorry—and I love you, I love you so damned much—are you hurting? Do you need more potion? Are you comfortable enough?"

And it hurts too much for him to talk, but he flushes all over, and it takes Hermione a moment to realize what he is flushing about. She thinks briefly about Lavender before swiping it from her mind. Then she coughs, covering up her embarrassment with, always, swottiness. "Well, don't make a fuss over it. Of course I love you, you idiot. You're mine."

Dammit, they're in a war. She doesn't have time to be embarrassed.

Besides, Mama's always right.

Ron smiles, his cheeks stretching as far as they can go, and he looks at her like she is the greatest present he has ever received, and Hermione flashes back to firstie Ron, dirtsmudged and neglected and poorer than he can bear.

Well, he can't speak now so she'll have to speak for him. "Love me?" she asks, very quiet. _Love me in the way I mean?_

And he just continues to grin. He really does look like an idiot—stupidly happy.

Hermione scoffs, then slides onto his hospital bed, and he stills, uncertain. She presses her forehead to his, like what she did with her Harry. She holds his gaze: "Blink if you love me."

(And Ron thinks she's not funny, ha!)

And of course, Ron smiles, a gurgle of a laugh choking his throat and making him wince, and he tries to hold his eyes as wide as he can, boring into hers, and she can make out the thin red veins that hadn't burst from the poison.

And his eyes dry and she she swallows back her laughter at the strain until eventually he gives, eyelashes flut-flut-fluttering, blinking every second, staring and blinking, madly trying to convey what Hermione knows utterly: yes, he loves her.

Hermione laughs then, cuddling into his neck, careful fingers settling on his throat, so grateful, so grateful, that she prays thank you to the universe for his safety.

 _Ron lives and she loves him and he loves her._

She looks up and Harry is resting against the doorjamb, and he is beaming, his first smile since the Draco incident, and he looks so tired he is practically swaying against the doorframe.

Hermione waves him over to their hospital bed—the same one from first year, Hermione realizes with a start. How about that? And Harry settles on the other side of Ron, and Hermione can see the loss of adrenaline has worn him pliant as a pillow.

"It was good thinking about the bezoar, Harry." She whispers. "Where'd you learn that?"

"Can't learn everything from you, Mione," Harry yawns, wrapping an arm around Ron's pillows so that he can prop himself up.

"Cheeky." Hermione flicks his nose.

Harry smiles but something unidentifiable chases it off his face and is followed by sadness. Maybe it was guilt? Harry's been wearing it like a coat. Savior of the World, almost-murder, horcru—

No. Hermione will not allow that thought.

 _If you looked into the Mirror of Erised now,_ she says to Harry in her mind, _you wouldn't see Lily and James Potter. You would see us, your family._

Ron threads his too-warm fingers through hers, and yes, she's happy. Harry settles his hand over theirs. "Love you," Harry says lowly. It's the first time he's said it out loud.

Hermione looks at Ron and says the words for him: " _Of course_."

 _Blink if you love me. You don't belong here._

Her ring is cold on her finger.

* * *

Hermione will forever call June the Blitzkrieg month, the _lightning war_ :

Dumbledore is dead.

Death Eaters have swarmed Hogwarts.

The War has begun.

Hermione nods: okay. Give them hell.

* * *

Author's Note:

Next chapter, the worlds collide, permanently, _and horribly_. Brace yourselves.

Notes on the chapter:

A) Anna's prayer is taken from the Babylonian Talmud. B) I switched up events in Sixth Year to suit my purposes. C) Hermione is actually pansexual, which will be explored much later. D) the rating for this fic is jumping to M, just to be on the safe side. E) Hermione growing into a healthy body image will be explored throughout this series-it's important to me that Hermione confronts her her unhealthy ideas about her scars.

F) I won't label any of Hermione's relationships as taboo—I don't believe in the "don't like, don't read," approach. I'm trying to write about a human (witch) experience, and I believe a human experience is about empathy and representation and relationships and identity, so I want to explore it without treating it as taboo.

G) LASTLY, and most importantly, love to all of you! This chapter was a mammoth, but it was worth it. I felt so much love (and sadness) writing this. Will you let me know your thoughts?

Hope you feel my love: the world needs love right now.


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